Big Content lawyers set up pron honeypots

Copyright trolls were not just suing pirates they were actively encouraging people to do so by providing them with torrents.

A case in the US against copyright troll Prenda Law has presented evidence that the company uploading videos to BitTorrent that were then used to sue various defendants for either "hacking" or copyright infringement. On one hand he was saying that copyright infringement was evil and the other he was setting up the file so it was free for the taking. If the evidence proves true, it means that the files Prenda placed on the various sites were authorised and his victims could not be sued.

However it is clear that Prenda did not think people would find out. His thought was that he could just take the ip addresses from everyone who downloaded the torrent. Unfortunately someone noticed that all the movies that had been placed on Pirate Bay were all put up by one person who used the handle sharkmp4.

Sharkmp4 seemed to be able to post these works on The Pirate Bay before the works were even mentioned anywhere else, and in at least one case, "sharkmp4" put a video up on The Pirate Bay three days before Prenda shell company Ingenuity 13 had even filed for the copyright. Sharkmp4 appears to have the same IP address that was confirmed as being used by John Steele to log into his own GoDaddy account.